Dec 19, 2011

Why is it victim blaming to talk about rape and drinking?

I posted this a few days ago on a LiveJournal community, in response to a post that generated hundreds of irate comments but seems to have been deleted. In any case, a couple of people asked if they could have a non-locked link to the text, so here it is.

The context, very briefly for non-LJ users, was a post in which someone was defending the position that women should accept responsibility for sexual encounters when they are falling down drunk, rather than "use the blanket excuse" of rape / inability to consent. The discussion that followed fell very much along the lines described below - between those who said drinking has nothing to do with it, and those who took the superficially common sense approach that it does.

"That" thread has gone a bit newkular, and I just wanted to
tease out one aspect of the conversation and highlight it separately so that
maybe (if anyone is still left standing at this point) we could have a more
targeted discussion about the issues around alcohol and victim blaming.

Quite a few people in the thread made the point that by
drinking, women "put themselves at risk", because alcohol impairs
your judgement and make you more vulnerable to abuse/exploitation. And quite a
few other people have pointed out that it is only the case when a potential
abuser or exploiter is around to try and abuse or exploit you. Booze is neither
a necessary nor sufficient condition for rape. Like, I've been shit-faced a
bunch of times in my life, and every time I checked my pants during those
(happy) occasions, there was a mysterious absence of an unwanted penis in my
vagina. Fancy that.

But but but, rejoin the alcohol-is-a-risk-factor common
sense advocates! You can't deny that there is a statistical link between alcohol
and rape! Why are feminists being so pig headed about saying that women
shouldn't drink because it increases their risk of being raped? You feminists
are just illogical.

Well, yes. It is true that there is something of a
correlation between alcohol consumption and rape incidence, especially the
non-stranger rape that we (unsatisfactorily in my view) call "date
rape". It's perhaps not as huge as people think (not a necessary or
sufficient condition, remember), but it's there. There are two main reasons for
this:

- We consume a lot of alcohol as a society. Almost no social
occasion is routinely marked without some kind of tippling going on. So there
is an extremely high likelihood that the sort of co-ed social occasion that
brings women in physical proximity with rapists would also include some
products of fermentation or distillation. That's just how we have fun - there
was probably music there too, but we don't go around saying music gets you
raped.

- Rapists know who to target. And no, I am not talking about
targeting women who are too weak to defend themselves due to being
incapacitated by alcohol. I'm talking about women the rapists know will not be
believed if they report rape. The list of things that makes you a woman who
will not believed is so long an exhaustive as to pretty much get any man off
the hook for doing anything to any woman in the right circumstances - read this article about a man who drug-raped at least 21 women but the jury would not
convict him of a single count despite overwhelming evidence - but there are a
couple of things that top the list, and drinking (even moderately) is one of
them.

Second to raping, what rapists care about most of all is
getting away with it. Very few of your common or garden variety rapists have
horns, or breathe fire, or jump out at unsuspecting virgins from sinister
bushes. The overwhelming majority of rapists pass for regular guys, and they
are very invested in continuing to pass so that they can continue to rape. And
also, you know, stay out of jail. So they target women who they are aware will
have credibility problems: drunk women, promiscuous women, women who have come
out on a date with them willingly, women who are sex workers.

Aha! I hear the Protect Thyself brigade reviving. So you're
saying there are things that clearly make you
a target for rapists! So you should avoid doing them, duh.

Well, not quite. Because the thing about this laundry list
of get out of jail cards is that it's completely arbitrary. In our Anglo
Western country and maybe a few other places in the West, booze and short
skirts have the bad rap, but in other cultures the rules are different and
equally nonsensical. In some cultures, if a woman is not completely veiled and
covered head to toe, people say that she is risking rape. In Azerbaijan where
I was born, it was a well known fact that getting in the front seat of a
taxi will get you immediately raped, and serve you right for being stupid. A friend of mine who
runs the amazing anti-FGM charity Daughters of Eve says that girls in her
community are told that if they are not cut, and are raped, it would be their
own fault.

There is a list as long as your arm of reasons why a woman
has brought rape upon herself. Some are more subtle, some less. All of them
have something to do with behaviours that are generally disapproved of for
women in that culture, and rape is used as the stick to frighten them into
compliance; at the same time the "obvious risks" are used to justify
rape. Frankly the only way a woman could completely 100% avoid being blamed for
her own rape is to not exist.

Well, I hear you say, but if these rules are completely
arbitrary and not somehow built in to the innate male sexual instinct, then how
do rapists know what they are, huh?

Because we tell them. We tell them all the time, by
questioning women, criticising women and advising women. When we tell women -
be it in an LJ post or a police campaign - to not wear short skirts in case
their get raped, what rapists hear is "if I rape a woman in a short skirt
I'm less likely to be blamed". Same goes for the anti-drinking tips, or
all that "helpful" advice about holding your keys in your hands as
you approach your car in a dark car park. A woman was raped in a hotel car park
while putting her child in the car seat - and the hotel blamed her for
"not taking adequate precautions". Why? Because we've told women to
take adequate precautions so many times, every schmuck can now recognise that
sliver of an opportunity where they can claim it's the precautions that were
not precautionary enough. And probably get away with it.

And that's why it's de facto victim blaming to talk about
alcohol and rape in this way. Because what you are saying - unless you're
making the fantastical claim that alcohol consumption leads to the growing of
spontaneous penises in hitherto unsuspecting vaginas - is that a woman who took
part in a normal everyday social interaction is fair game. You're not saying it
to yourself, or to the world at large - you're saying it directly to the only
people who have ultimate and exclusive control over the number of rapes
perpetrated in the world. You're telling rapists how they can target victims so as to avoid admitting responsibility for their actions, to themselves as well as to the world.

And this dangerous distraction has got to stop, because the longer we're on the "is it or isn't it victim blaming" merry-go-round, the longer we won't be doing any rapist blaming, which is where our energies should really lie.

7 comments:

When we tell women - be it in an LJ post or a police campaign - to not wear short skirts in case their get raped, what rapists hear is "if I rape a woman in a short skirt I'm less likely to be blamed".

It's also helped a little to finish the guilt I have surrounding my own rape. I wasn't raped because I was drunk. I was raped because my rapist knew that raping me was something he could get away with, because our culture tells him and people like him that drunk women are fair game. And, sadly, he did get away with it, because thanks to victim blaming it took several years for me to realise, properly, that I'd been raped.

yes and no. I agree with the basic argument about victim blaming. But I disagree with your argument that it shouldn't be talked about because the rapists might get the idea that this might get them off the hook. Well I'm not saying you are wrong. But we should be able to talk about what we damn well please without scumbags being able to use these excuses... because these stupid excuses that 'the woman wasn't protecting herself properly' shouldn't have any resonance in courtrooms and people's minds, and until we are able to talk this through with the people who believe these things we can't get past this.